A name is not a mere word that other persons pronounce but is intimately connected to the identity of a particular person or entity. Consequently, every one of us corrects pronunciation of his or her name when others do not pronoun or write it correctly. Conversely, persons who mistakenly write or pronounce a name incorrectly are typically apologetic in recognition of the strong relation between a person and his or her name. Even more importantly, a mistake in the writing of a name may have adverse legal consequences as such a misspelled name may confer rights to someone not entitled to them, or revoke rights to someone entitled to them. So, in organizations such as passport departments, police departments, banks and hospitals, the accuracy and care with which names are correctly spelled is of great importance.
The aforementioned problems have been greatly exacerbated as a result of increased global travel between countries that speak different languages and use different alphabets. Such travel often requires a transliteration of the traveler's name from the alphabet of the traveler's home (or “source”) country into the alphabet of the visited (or “target”) country between the following three documents:                1—A national ID card: Such cards are issued by many countries to identify their citizens. For example, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia issues a National ID Card to each of its citizens, and the person's name is written on it in the official letters of the state.        2—Passport: This is an ID which the state issues to its citizens to allow them to travel among different countries, and the person's name is written on it in Roman letters.        3—Resident ID: This is an ID card issued by the host country to the foreign person residing in it. This ID facilitates the person's travel inside the host country without the need for using the passport. In this ID card, the person's name is written in the official language of the host country so that concerned entities such as police departments, traffic regulators, recruitment departments, work places, universities and other organizations and officials can read the name, write it, and record it in an archive or official record. This kind of document is called “residence permit” or “Iqama” in Saudi Arabia.        
So, under the present system, the name of a traveler in his identity documents is often written in three different writing systems. For instance, for a Chinese citizen who wishes to travel to and reside for a time in Saudi Arabia, his name will be written according to the Chinese writing system in his national ID, in Roman letters in his passport, and in Arabic letters in his residence permit for Saudi Arabia. This means that the name transfers from its original system of writing to two different writing systems, one of which is the writing system in Roman letters which is internationally applicable for passports, the other of which is the writing system of the host or “target” country.
Transliteration systems have been devised to deal with the problem of converting a name written in a non-Roman alphabet into Roman letters. The advantage of such systems is that they provide a consistent transliteration of names into Roman letter form. However, such systems are limited to the conversion of a single non-Roman language into Roman letters (e.g., Arabic into English) and are not applicable to all non-Roman languages. Even worse, there is no standard, universal system for transliterating a name from a source country into a name in a target country in the case where the source and target countries use different alphabets. Accordingly, different transliterations are possible when different transliteration systems are used, which may lead to the same problems that a misspelling of the name causes.
The problems associated with the transliteration of names is not confined to the names of persons, but also extends to the names of companies, international trade marks, and the names of medicines, medical systems and equipment and their associated intellectual property law rights. Hence there is also a need for a mechanism for transliterating such trade names and trademarks in such a manner that the sound of the trade name or trademark in the target language is the same or very similar to the sound of the name or trademark in the source language. Presently, there is no standardized, universal process for the transliteration of such trade names and trademarks. This again results in such names and marks being written in multiple ways, which is potentially confusing to the consumer, and may give rise to the infringement of intellectual property rights associated with these names and marks.